Jeanine Basinger

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Deanna Durbin's movies are about innocence and sweetness. They're from a different time and a different place. Outside the movie house, there was Depression, poverty, war, death, and loss. Audiences then were willing to pretend, to enter into a game of escape. No one really thought that the world was like a Deanna Durbin movie, they just wanted to pretend it was for about an hour and a half

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In-laws were often used as plot devices to drive a happy couple apart, to destroy marital love and trust

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Another superb movie about a mature marriage grounded in a fundamental lack of communication is Dodsworth, based on the Sinclair Lewis novel

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Excellent films do exist on the subject, however, and one is a pure marriage movie in which Newman and Woodward make it work. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge exists to tell moviegoers that the marriage of their parents—especially if they were those tragic dogsbodies, Midwesterners—were fogbound. The film depicts a steady relationship that has no real communication between its couple

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Movies with interfering in-laws and kids are often presented as comic, the ridicule bringing welcome relief to beleaguered married folks suffering offscreen at the hands of relatives